Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on the labor anti-war strike slogan raised in this issue (the Campus Work Stoppage Committee article):
As I have noted on other occasions timing in politics is very important, and the timing of the raising of slogans in the revolutionary movement is a fine art that was most successfully practiced by the Bolsheviks during the course of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Speaking of the slogans for anti-war work today (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya on the active fronts, Pakistan and Iran on the hands off front) I have not seen lately any call for a labor anti-war strike. And just at this minute rightfully so. While many (including some die-hard conservatives for their own perverse reasons) are ready to throw in the towel on Afghanistan and Libya there is no mass movement afoot ready to smite the Obama administration down over the issue. And certainly while the working class has borne the brunt of the economic hard times, sent their sons and daughters in combat as cannon fodders in high numbers, and is as war-weary as most of the rest of the population this has not resulted in any significant movement to take the matter in their own hands. The reasons for that are many, although they will be not detailed here, except to note that a call for a labor anti-war strike would find no resonance right this moment.
The whole point of making that last statement above is to contrast today with the situation in 1970 when not only was the general populace, including the working class, war-weary of the Vietnam War but there were ripples of overt opposition to the war that was costing the working class its economic security, to speak nothing of its sending off the cream of it youth, mainly sons, to fight that war. Thus raising the labor anti-war strike slogan when there was some motion in the working class, the bankruptcy of the mainstream anti-war movement strategy of endless marches, bourgeois electioneering, and praying (and conversely by those radicals who were repulsed those dead-end solution, madcap adventurism), and the objective political situation of the time (the Johnson/Nixon regimes’ almost seamless bi-partisan continuation of the war) made perfect political sense. In fact not to raise it then bordered on revolutionary political irresponsibility, at least as a propaganda point and cutting edge against the reformists. Yes, timing in politics is many times decisive. Let’s hope we will be able to raise that labor anti-war strike slogan ourselves in the next period.
Additional comment on SDS and Women’s Liberation:
There are plenty of villains, political villains, including this writer responsible for the “sectoralization” of the radical movement in the late 1960’s-early 1970s, a condition that essentially continues to this day in attenuated form (attenuated due to the smallness of the radical element in any of the so-called sectors). Sectoralization, for those unfamiliar with the term was the notion that blacks, gays, women, workers, students, whatever could only organize among their own kind, exclusively and uncriticized by others, and that these sectors would somehow magically transpose their sometimes adversarial positions on revolution day. Never, in other words.
The villain part, at least in regard to the women’s liberation movement, was that many of the criticisms made in the name of feminist separation were correct, especially around rampant male chauvinism in the movement, not excluding PL/SDS or other SDS factions. Of course, most of those making these pungent criticisms eventually had not problem working with males, and comfortably found their way into the good offices of the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, as the article correctly points out, the nuclear bourgeois family (ma, pa, kids, and dog or cat, or some variation on that theme) today in America, is the central obstacle to true women’s liberation (socialization of housework, collective responsibility for childcare, greater access to higher levels in the workplace, etc.). As stated what is necessary is to recognize that victory in the class struggle by the working class will, of necessity, have to address the myriad problems connected with the special oppression of women (black and other oppressed groups as well). Let’s get to it.
Showing posts with label student vanguardism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label student vanguardism. Show all posts
Monday, July 18, 2011
Sunday, July 17, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)-May-June 1970
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on the labor anti-war strike slogan raised in this issue:
As I have noted on other occasions timing in politics is very important, and the timing of the raising of slogans in the revolutionary movement is a fine art that was most successfully practiced by the Bolsheviks during the course of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Speaking of the slogans for anti-war work today (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya on the active fronts, Pakistan and Iran on the hands off front) I have not seen lately any call for a labor anti-war strike. And just at this minute rightfully so. While many (including some die-hard conservatives for their own perverse reasons) are ready to throw in the towel on Afghanistan and Libya there is no mass movement afoot ready to smite the Obama administration down over the issue. And certainly while the working class has borne the brunt of the economic hard times, sent their sons and daughters in combat as cannon fodders in high numbers, and is as war-weary as most of the rest of the population this has not resulted in any significant movement to take the matter in their own hands. The reasons for that are many, although they will be not detailed here, except to note that a call for an labor anti-war strike would find no resonance right this moment.
The whole point of making that last statement above is to contrast today with the situation in 1970 when not only was the general populace, including the working class, war-weary of the Vietnam War but there were ripples of overt opposition to the war that was costing the working class its economic security, to speak nothing of its sending off the cream of it youth, mainly sons, to fight that war. Thus raising the labor anti-war strike slogan when there was some motion in the working class, the bankruptcy of the mainstream anti-war movement strategy of endless marches, bourgeois electioneering, and praying (and conversely by those radicals who were repulsed those dead-end solution, madcap adventurism), and the objective political situation of the time (the Johnson/Nixon regimes’ almost seamless bi-partisan continuation of the war) made perfect political sense. In fact not to raise it then bordered on revolutionary political irresponsibility, at least as a propaganda point and cutting edge against the reformists. Yes, timing in politics is many times decisive. Let’s hope we will be able to raise that labor anti-war strike slogan ourselves in the next period.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on the labor anti-war strike slogan raised in this issue:
As I have noted on other occasions timing in politics is very important, and the timing of the raising of slogans in the revolutionary movement is a fine art that was most successfully practiced by the Bolsheviks during the course of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Speaking of the slogans for anti-war work today (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya on the active fronts, Pakistan and Iran on the hands off front) I have not seen lately any call for a labor anti-war strike. And just at this minute rightfully so. While many (including some die-hard conservatives for their own perverse reasons) are ready to throw in the towel on Afghanistan and Libya there is no mass movement afoot ready to smite the Obama administration down over the issue. And certainly while the working class has borne the brunt of the economic hard times, sent their sons and daughters in combat as cannon fodders in high numbers, and is as war-weary as most of the rest of the population this has not resulted in any significant movement to take the matter in their own hands. The reasons for that are many, although they will be not detailed here, except to note that a call for an labor anti-war strike would find no resonance right this moment.
The whole point of making that last statement above is to contrast today with the situation in 1970 when not only was the general populace, including the working class, war-weary of the Vietnam War but there were ripples of overt opposition to the war that was costing the working class its economic security, to speak nothing of its sending off the cream of it youth, mainly sons, to fight that war. Thus raising the labor anti-war strike slogan when there was some motion in the working class, the bankruptcy of the mainstream anti-war movement strategy of endless marches, bourgeois electioneering, and praying (and conversely by those radicals who were repulsed those dead-end solution, madcap adventurism), and the objective political situation of the time (the Johnson/Nixon regimes’ almost seamless bi-partisan continuation of the war) made perfect political sense. In fact not to raise it then bordered on revolutionary political irresponsibility, at least as a propaganda point and cutting edge against the reformists. Yes, timing in politics is many times decisive. Let’s hope we will be able to raise that labor anti-war strike slogan ourselves in the next period.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)- March 1970
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment :
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment :
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on the Racial Oppression-Irvine and RMC Positions article in this issue:
As I have noted on numerous other occasions I am a proud son of the working class, of the desperate working poor segment of that class to boot. Nevertheless I had written off the working class as a factor in my early political schemes. That is until 1969. And even then, as I noted in an earlier series of commentaries (see archives, July 3, 2011, on Campus Spartacist), I was only “toying” with Marxism in that year. And part of that “toying” was a rather hard-headed approach to the capacities of the American working class (others, like the French and Italian, I was more agnostic on) to make a socialist revolution, and keep it.
Always implicit in the Marxist worldview of the centrality of the working class in the overthrow of the capitalist system is the notion that this class itself would have to break with its former traditions under capitalism. In short, to break with such notions as a “fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” using trade unions as merely the best (at least for America
It seemed on the face of it an improbable strategy, but only, as I did at the time, if one looked through the static situation of the class in any given period. A closer study of the Russian Revolution of 1917, of the work of the Bolsheviks since the aborted revolution of 1905, and of the necessity of a vanguard party (as opposed to a mass, all-purpose, all-inclusive workers party) broke me, somewhat, somewhat kicking and screaming really, to see this other way of organizing. And through fits and starts, successes and a rather longer number of failures, that notion, that vanguard notion, still makes sense. If we can just get enough cadres together to help pull it off.
Additional Note:
The key historical argument in this issue centers on the role of revolutionaries in the fight against special oppression, as addressed here of blacks as a race-color caste in America
Friday, July 15, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)-February 1970
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on this issue:
As I have noted on numerous other occasions I am a proud son of the working class, of the desperate working poor segment of that class to boot. Nevertheless I had written off the working class as a factor in my early political schemes. That is until 1969. And even then, as I noted in an earlier series of commentaries (see archives, July 1-8, 2011, on Campus Spartacist), I was only “toying” with Marxism in that year. And part of that “toying” was a rather hard-headed approach to the capacities of the American working class (others, like the French and Italian, I was more agnostic on) to make a socialist revolution, and keep it.
Always implicit in the Marxist worldview of the centrality of the working class in the overthrow of the capitalist system is the notion that this class itself would have to break with its former traditions under capitalism. In short, to break with such notions as a “fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” using trade unions as merely the best (at least for America since the early 1900’s) arenas for socialists to work in to bring class consciousness, revolutionary class consciousness, to working people. That was initially my problem with the Marxist worldview, that notion that revolutionaries should work in the trade unions to bring class consciousness to the workers. Or, maybe, at a more fundamental level, that “bringing” a class, or any other social formation for that matter, anything, much less a revolutionary solution, a, frankly, desperate revolutionary solution to their problems, seemed way too, I will be kind, esoteric.
It seemed on the face of it an improbable strategy, but only, as I did at the time, if one looked through the static situation of the class in any given period. A closer study of the Russian Revolution of 1917, of the work of the Bolsheviks since the aborted revolution of 1905, and of the necessity of a vanguard party (as opposed to a mass, all-purpose, all-inclusive workers party) broke me, somewhat, somewhat kicking and screaming really, to see this other way of organizing. And through fits and starts, successes and a rather longer number of failures, that notion, that vanguard notion, still makes sense. If we can just get enough cadres together to help pull it off.
Additional Note:
The four-point program presented here by the RMC, culminating in breaking with the Democrats and the fight for a labor party, was just such a counterposed program to attract serious student militants at the time. Particularly when PL, the CP, the SWP, and others had lost their moorings and began to cater to what? Liberalism, narrow campus-issue-ism (WSA), social workerism (CWSA), and so on. In the next student upsurge, or general working class upsurge, that we have seen just the glimmer of signs of this year with the public workers union struggles we will need just such a program to attract, and keep, serious militants.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter
Note on Issue Numbering for
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus
The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.
They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.
Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.
BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.
Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.
Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on this issue:
As I have noted on numerous other occasions I am a proud son of the working class, of the desperate working poor segment of that class to boot. Nevertheless I had written off the working class as a factor in my early political schemes. That is until 1969. And even then, as I noted in an earlier series of commentaries (see archives, July 1-8, 2011, on Campus Spartacist), I was only “toying” with Marxism in that year. And part of that “toying” was a rather hard-headed approach to the capacities of the American working class (others, like the French and Italian, I was more agnostic on) to make a socialist revolution, and keep it.
Always implicit in the Marxist worldview of the centrality of the working class in the overthrow of the capitalist system is the notion that this class itself would have to break with its former traditions under capitalism. In short, to break with such notions as a “fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” using trade unions as merely the best (at least for America since the early 1900’s) arenas for socialists to work in to bring class consciousness, revolutionary class consciousness, to working people. That was initially my problem with the Marxist worldview, that notion that revolutionaries should work in the trade unions to bring class consciousness to the workers. Or, maybe, at a more fundamental level, that “bringing” a class, or any other social formation for that matter, anything, much less a revolutionary solution, a, frankly, desperate revolutionary solution to their problems, seemed way too, I will be kind, esoteric.
It seemed on the face of it an improbable strategy, but only, as I did at the time, if one looked through the static situation of the class in any given period. A closer study of the Russian Revolution of 1917, of the work of the Bolsheviks since the aborted revolution of 1905, and of the necessity of a vanguard party (as opposed to a mass, all-purpose, all-inclusive workers party) broke me, somewhat, somewhat kicking and screaming really, to see this other way of organizing. And through fits and starts, successes and a rather longer number of failures, that notion, that vanguard notion, still makes sense. If we can just get enough cadres together to help pull it off.
Additional Note:
The four-point program presented here by the RMC, culminating in breaking with the Democrats and the fight for a labor party, was just such a counterposed program to attract serious student militants at the time. Particularly when PL, the CP, the SWP, and others had lost their moorings and began to cater to what? Liberalism, narrow campus-issue-ism (WSA), social workerism (CWSA), and so on. In the next student upsurge, or general working class upsurge, that we have seen just the glimmer of signs of this year with the public workers union struggles we will need just such a program to attract, and keep, serious militants.
Friday, July 01, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-"Campus Spartacist" (October 1965)
Click on the headline to link to the Campus Spartacist archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Campus Spartacist
Campus Spartacus was published as a stand alone newsletter irregularly in localized version of the SL's national collage network, with issues published in Austin, NYC, and the Bay Area from 1965 thorugh 1971. The list below frelects these local versions.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Markin comment on this issue:
Although this newsletter issue is over forty-five years old the issues concerning the Indian sub-continent, the right to national self-determination (Kashmir and elsewhere), and above all, the question of the continuing validity of the great Russian Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, properly up-dated, reads like this issue was written today, or at the latest yesterday.
*********
Campus Spartacist
Campus Spartacus was published as a stand alone newsletter irregularly in localized version of the SL's national collage network, with issues published in Austin, NYC, and the Bay Area from 1965 thorugh 1971. The list below frelects these local versions.
—Riazanov Library
******
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Markin comment on this issue:
Although this newsletter issue is over forty-five years old the issues concerning the Indian sub-continent, the right to national self-determination (Kashmir and elsewhere), and above all, the question of the continuing validity of the great Russian Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, properly up-dated, reads like this issue was written today, or at the latest yesterday.
Friday, June 10, 2011
From The Archives Of The International Communist League- When Polemic Ruled The Day-The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited- A Reply To The "Guardian", Part One-THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
***********
The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited
These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]
Reply to the Guardian
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED
THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION
In their tireless efforts to betray the struggles of the workers and peasants, the Stalinists must continue to maintain a pretense of revolutionism. Yet their doctrines stand counterposed to the line of Marxism. This presents them with a dilemma, which they can only resolve by resorting to systematic lies about the Trotskyists. This goes from distortions of the political positions of Trotsky (as well as Marx and Lenin), to denying Trotsky's leading role as the military organizer of the October Revolution and accusing him of carrying out espionage for the Mikado! While many of the specific charges leveled against Zinoviev, Bukharin and other leading Bolsheviks accused of Trotskyism during the Moscow Trials were admitted by Khrushchev in 1956 to be total fabrications, the method remains. Today we are witnessing a widespread revival of the "Stalin School of Falsification" especially on the part of the various Maoist groups. Just as Stalin in his day needed a cover to justify his crimes against the working class, so today must the Maoists resort to vicious slander in order to cover for their counterrevolutionary policies in Bangladesh, Indonesia and elsewhere. This series is intended as a reply to these lies and an introduction to some of the basic concepts of Trotskyism, as they have developed in the struggle against Stalinist reformism during the past fifty years.
The struggle between the reformist line of Stalinism and the revolutionary policies of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky is no academic matter of interest only to historians. The counterrevolutionary policies of the "Great Organizer of Defeats" (Stalin) led not only to the assassination of Trotsky by an agent of Stalin's GPU and the murder of tens of thousands of Russian Left Oppositionists in the Siberian concentration camps, but also to the strangulation of the Chinese (1927), German (1933), French (1936), Spanish (1937), Indonesian (1965) and French (1968) revolutions as well as the sellout "peace agreements" of the Vietnamese Stalinists in 1946 and 1954. The struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism is literally a matter of life and death for the revolutionary movement and must be given the closest attention by militants who are seeking the road to Marxism.
What is the Permanent Revolution?
At the heart of this conflict is the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. This theory, first advanced at the time of the 1905 Russian revolution, was summarized by Trotsky in his article "Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution," written in 1939:
"...the complete victory of the democratic revolution in Russia is conceivable only in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which would inevitably place on the order of the day not only the democratic but socialistic tasks as well, would at the same time give a powerful impetus to the international socialist revolution. Only the victory of the proletariat in the West could protect Russia from bourgeois restoration and assure it the possibility of rounding out the establishment of socialism."
It is this theory which Davidson and the Stalinists reject when they say that "Trotsky's views on the course of the Russian revolution, like those of the Mensheviks, were refuted by history" (Guardian, 4 April 1973). In fact, only because the uprising never reached the seizure of power was Trotsky's theory not confirmed in practice in 1905. The course of the Russian Revolution of 1917 fully verified this theory. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat, embodied in soviet power, could solve the questions of land and peace, as well as liberating oppressed nations from czarist rule. Moreover, a careful analysis of Lenin's views in 1905 and 1917 shows that he came over to agreement with all the essential aspects of Trotsky's formulation, and abandoned his own earlier slogan of a "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry."
The Stalinist claim that Lenin still stood for a "democratic" revolution in 1917 and called for "socialism in one country" is pure fabrication. Likewise, their accusation that Trotsky's slogan was "Down with the Czar, For a Workers Government," supposedly ignoring the peasantry, was repeatedly denied by Trotsky. The slogan of permanent revolution was, rather, for the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the peasantry.
In Trotsky's view, because of the uneven and combined development of the world economy, the bourgeoisie of the backward countries is tightly bound to the feudal and imperialist interests, thereby preventing it from carrying out the fundamental tasks of the bourgeois revolution--democracy, agrarian revolution and national emancipation. In the presence of an aroused peasantry and a combative working class, each of these goals would directly threaten the political and economic dominance of the capitalist class. The tasks of the bourgeois revolution can be solved only by the alliance of the peasantry and the proletariat.
Marxism holds that there can only be one dominant class in the state. Since, as the Communist Manifesto states, the proletariat is the only consistently revolutionary class, this alliance must take the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the peasantry. In carrying out the democratic tasks of the revolution, the proletarian state must inevitably make "despotic inroads into the rights of bourgeois property" (e.g., expropriation of landlords), and thus the revolution directly passes over to socialist tasks, without pausing at any arbitrary "stages" or, as Lenin put it, without a "Chinese wall" being erected between the bourgeois and proletarian phases. Thus the revolution becomes permanent, eventually leading to the complete abolition of classes (socialism).
But socialism is the product of the liberation of the productive forces at the highest level of capitalist development: classes can be abolished only by eliminating want, that is, scarcity. Thus, while the dictatorship of the proletariat may be established in an isolated and backward country, socialism must be the joint achievement of at least several advanced countries. For these complementary reasons the revolution must extend and deepen itself--or else perish. Thus the opposition between Trotsky's "permanent revolution" and Stalin's "socialism in one country" is in reality the opposition between socialism on a world scale and the most brutal regime of bourgeois-feudal reaction (barbarism); there is no middle road.
While the theory of permanent revolution was the achievement of Leon Trotsky, the concept was first introduced by Karl Marx in 1850. Davidson, in his effort to cloak Stalin's theory of "socialism in one country" with the mantle of Marxism, maintains that Marx's use of the phrase "permanent revolution" was simply a general observation about class struggle continuing until socialism:
"Thus the revolution is 'permanent' in two ways. First in looking toward the future, its course is one of uninterrupted class struggle until classes themselves are abolished. Second, looking back historically once classes are abolished, the revolution is permanent in the sense that there is no longer class struggle and the seizure of power and domination of one class by another."
--Guardian, 4 April 1973
At this level of abstraction, it is no wonder that Davidson concludes that differences arise only "in the particularity of the question." But let us take a look first at what Marx actually said:
"While the democratic petty-bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible, and with the achievement, at most, of the above demands, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, until the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians of these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of existing society but the foundation of a new one."
--Karl Marx, "Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League," 1850
This is in fact a powerful polemic, 75 years in advance, against Stalin's sophistry about "socialism in one country." Trotsky's theory is a further development of these fundamental propositions in the epoch of imperialism, when capitalism has penetrated throughout the backward regions and the objective prerequisites for socialism on a world scale already exist (thereby endangering even the young bourgeoisies of the ex-colonial countries).
Revolution by Stages: Germany 1848
According to the Stalinists the chief error of Trotskyism is the failure to recognize the necessity of "stages" of the revolution, in particular the democratic stage as opposed to the socialist stage. One of Davidson's more illustrious predecessors wrote (a few years before Stalin murdered him as a "Trotskyite"!):
"Comrade Trotsky put the dictatorship of the working class at the beginning of the process, but did not see the steps and transitions that led to this dictatorship; he ignored the concrete relation of forces...he did not see the stages of the revolution...."
--N. Bukharin, "On the Theory of Permanent Revolution," 1925
Let us consider this "theory" of two-stage revolution, the "particularity" of the permanent revolution. Did Marx, perhaps, have such a theory? Marx, of course, rigorously distinguished the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions as to their social content, since they represent different epochs of historical development. But even in the mid-19th century it was becoming clear that the bourgeoisie was too weak and the proletariat too powerful for there to exist a "Chinese wall" between the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. Distinct in social content, they would be closely linked historically. The German revolution of 1848 made this link particularly clear. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote:
"Communists pay special attention to Germany. There are two reasons for this. First of all, Germany is upon the eve of a bourgeois revolution. Secondly, this revolution will take place under comparatively advanced conditions as far as the general civilization of Europe is concerned, and when the German proletariat is much more highly developed than was the English proletariat in the seventeenth century or the French proletariat in the eighteenth. Consequently, in nineteenth-century Germany, the bourgeois revolution can only be the immediate precursor of a proletarian revolution."
Marx did not believe that the working class could directly achieve victory in 1848, but that it would be forced to support the liberal bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie insofar as they fought against feudal-absolutist reaction. But even in this pre-imperialist period, when the proletariat was quite weak and politically dominated by the artisan and democratic petty-bourgeois interests, he counseled the workers to "simultaneously erect their own revolutionary workers' government hard by the new official government" in order to oppose their previous ally, as well as bring about "the arming of the whole proletariat."
Marx's prediction that proletarian revolution would closely follow the bourgeois revolutions of 1848 was not borne out. But neither were there successful bourgeois revolutions, precisely because the fear that proletarian revolution would break out if the least step were taken to rouse the masses drove the liberals into the arms of Prussian and Austrian reaction. Tied to the feudalists by a common dread of social revolution, the liberals strove not to overthrow the monarchy (as did the French bourgeoisie in 1789), but to share power with the feudalists. The German bourgeoisie could not rise above the level of a "shopocracy," as Engels put it.
Revolution by Stages: Russia 1905
The Russian revolution of 1905 again raised the question of permanent revolution, but in much sharper form. The Russian bourgeoisie was far weaker even than the German. For centuries the main characteristic of Russian development was its primitiveness and slowness, resulting from Russia's unfavorable geographic location and sparse population. Capitalist development in the northern empire was primarily imported from the West by the autocratic state, simply grafted on to the existing feudal economy. Thus while a modern industrial proletariat was forming in the main cities, concentrated in large factories which utilized the most advanced techniques, the town handicrafts and early forms of manufacture which had formed the economic base for the bourgeoisie in the West, never had time to develop. With large industry primarily in the hands of European capital and state banks, the Russian capitalist class remained small in number, isolated, half-foreign and without historical traditions. Moreover, it remained tied by a thousand strands to the feudalist-absolutist state and the landed aristocracy. A bourgeois-led revolution which could solve the tasks of democracy, agrarian revolution and national emancipation, was utterly out of the question. And yet the tasks of the bourgeois revolution remained.
Faced with this reality the two wings of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party took sharply opposed positions. The Mensheviks with scholastic formalism and utter spinelessness deduced from the democratic character of the initial tasks of the revolution the "strategy" of an alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie. In a speech at the "Unification Congress" of the RSDLP (1906), Axelrod, a leading Menshevik, remarked:
"The social relations of Russia have ripened only for a bourgeois revolution....While this general political lawlessness persists, we must not even so much as mention the direct fight of the proletariat against other classes for political power....It is fighting for the conditions of bourgeois development. Objective historical conditions doom our proletariat to an inevitable collaboration with the bourgeoisie against our common enemy."
This conclusion was derived by simply mechanically pasting the classical scheme of European (and more particularly French) development onto Russian conditions, with the implications that proletarian revolution could only come after many decades of capitalist development. The kernel of the Menshevik position was captured by Plekhanov's remark that "we must prize the support of the non-proletarian parties and not drive them away from us by tactless behavior." To this Lenin responded: "...the liberals among the landed gentry will forgive you millions of 'tactless' acts, but they will never forgive incitements to take away their land."
As against Plekhanov's coalition with the bourgeoisie, Lenin called for a bloc with the peasantry to carry out the agrarian revolution. This was codified in his formula of a "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry":
"We must be perfectly certain in our minds as to what real social forces are opposed to 'tsarism....The big bourgeoisie, the landlords, the factory owners, and 'society,' which follows the Osvobozhdeniye [the liberals'] lead, cannot be such a force....We know that owing to their class position they are incapable of waging a decisive struggle against tsarism; they are too heavily fettered by private property, by capital and land to enter into a decisive struggle. They stand in too great need of tsarism, with its bureaucratic, police, and military forces for use against the proletariat and the peasantry, to want it to be destroyed. No, the only force capable of gaining 'a decisive victory over tsarism' means the establishment of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." [emphasis in original]
--V.I. Lenin, "Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution," 1905
This policy was irreconcilably opposed to the insipid liberalism of the Mensheviks, instead fanning the flames of peasant revolt and leading the proletariat in a "tactless" assault on the czarist autocracy. But at the same time he insisted on the characterization of the revolution as bourgeois, with power to be placed in the hands of the peasantry and the future opened to a flowering of capitalist development:
"Marxists are absolutely convinced of the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution. What does that mean? It means that the democratic reforms in the political system, and the social and economic reforms that have become a necessity for Russia, do not in themselves imply the undermining of bourgeois rule, on the contrary, they will, for the first time, really clear the ground for a wide and rapid, European and not Asiatic, development of capitalism; they will, for the first time, make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class."
--Ibid.
Trotsky's view, quoted at the beginning of this article, was distinct from those of the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, though immeasurably closer to the latter. As he later wrote:
"The theory of the permanent revolution, which originated in 1905...pointed out that the democratic tasks of the backward bourgeois nations lead directly, in our epoch, to the dictatorship of the proletariat and that the dictatorship of the proletariat puts socialist tasks on the order of the day."
--"Permanent Revolution," 1929
According to Davidson, Lenin "insisted that the revolution would develop in stages" while Trotsky supposedly completely ignored the bourgeois-democratic stage. This is simply a smokescreen. Trotsky never denied the bourgeois character of the initial phases of the revolution in the sense of its immediate historical tasks, but only in the sense of its driving forces and perspectives:
"Already in 1905, the Petersburg workers called their soviet a proletarian government. This designation passed into the everyday language of that time and was completely embodied in the program of the struggle of the working class for power. At the same time, we set up against Tsarism an elaborated program of political democracy (universal suffrage, republic, militia, etc.). We could act in no other way. Political democracy is a necessary stage in the development of the working masses--with the highly important reservation that in one case this stage lasts for decades, while in another, the revolutionary situation permits the masses to emancipate themselves from the prejudices of political democracy even before its institutions have been converted into reality." [emphasis in original]
--L. D. Trotsky, "Introduction" to The Year 1905, 1922
Davidson again tries to cloud the issues by claiming that Trotsky was "hostile to the peasantry" while "Lenin's view is directly_ opposite." This is pure fabrication. It is true that Trotsky dismissed out of hand the idea that the peasantry as a whole could be a "socialist ally" of the working class:
"From the very first moment after its taking power, the proletariat will have to find support in the antagonisms between the village poor and the village rich, between the agricultural proletariat and the agricultural bourgeoisie."
--L. D. Trotsky, "Results and Prospects," 1905
But in this respect, Lenin's view was identical:
"The struggle against the bureaucrat and the landlord can and must be waged together with all the peasants, even the well-to-do and the middle peasants. On the other hand, it is only together with the rural proletariat that the struggle against the bourgeoisie, and therefore against the well-to-do peasants too, can be properly waged."
--V.I. Lenin, "Petty-Bourgeois and Proletarian Socialism," 1905
The dispute between Lenin and Trotsky was not over whether or not the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution could be skipped or whether an alliance between the workers and peasants was necessary, but concerned the political mechanics of the collaboration of the proletariat and peasantry, the degree of independence of the latter. Trotsky pointed out (as had been shown by all past revolutionary experience, as well as the writings of Marx and Engels) that because of its intermediate position and heterogeneity of its social composition, the peasantry as a class was incapable of taking an independent role or forming its own independent party. It was compelled to follow the lead of either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.
Revolution in Stages: 1917
It is no accident that Davidson's articles hardly mention the 1917 October Revolution, going instead from the disputes in 1905 over the role of the peasantry straight to the question of "socialism in one country." Indeed, had Davidson reproduced Lenin's writings from this period he would have had to print statements radically different from Lenin's view of the 1905-1907 period. Before Lenin's arrival from Europe on 4 April the majority of the Bolshevik party called for "critical support" to the bourgeois Provisional Government of Prince Lvov, which had taken power after the February revolution overthrew the czar. Stalin was the chief spokesman for this viewpoint at the March 1917 Bolshevik Party Conference. In his report on the attitude to the Provisional Government, he said:
"...the Provisional Government has in fact taken the role of fortifier of the conquests of the revolutionary people....It is not to our advantage at present to force events, hastening the process of repelling the bourgeois layers, who will in the future inevitably withdraw from us. It is necessary for us to gain time by putting a brake on the splitting away of the middle-bourgeois layers....Insofar as the Provisional Government fortifies the steps of the revolution, to that extent we must support it; but insofar as it is counterrevolutionary, support to the Provisional Government is not permissible."
--"Draft Protocol of the March 1917 All-Russian Conference of Party Workers"
While the bulk of the party leadership called for "completing the bourgeois-democratic revolution," Lenin insisted that the only revolutionary policy was calling for the dictatorship of the proletariat. In taking this position he came over to Trotsky's program of permanent revolution, and was accused of Trotskyism by the right wing. This required an ideological rearming of the party and at one point Lenin threatened to resign from the Central Committee in order to take the struggle to the ranks when his "April Theses" were initially voted down by the leadership. The key passage in these theses stated:
"The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution--which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organization of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants."
--V.I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution," 1917
In direct opposition to Stalin's position of less than a week earlier, Lenin demanded "No Support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear..." (Ibid.). The opposition to Lenin was led by Y. Kamenev who claimed that "the bourgeois-democratic revolution is not completed....As for Comrade Lenin's general scheme, it appears to us unacceptable, inasmuch as it proceeds from the assumption that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed, and builds on the immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution." In his "Letters on Tactics" Lenin replied to this charge:
"After the revolution [of February-March 1917], the power is in the hands of a different class, a new class, namely, the bourgeoisie....
"To this extent, the bourgeois, or the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed.
"But at this point we hear a clamor of protest from people who readily call themselves 'old Bolsheviks.' Didn't we always maintain, they say, that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed only by the 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry'?...My answer is: The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently....
"'The Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies'--there you have the 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry' already accomplished in reality.
"This formula is already antiquated....
"A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defensist, internationalist, 'Communist' elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small-proprietor or petty-bourgeois elements....
"The person who now only speaks of a 'revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry' is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of 'Bolshevik' pre-revolutionary antiques....
"Comrade Kamenev...has repeated the bourgeois prejudice about the Paris Commune having wanted to introduce socialism 'immediately.' This is not so. The Commune, unfortunately, was too slow in introducing socialism. The real essence of the Commune is...in the creation of a state of a special type. Such a state has already arisen in Russia, it is the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies!"
--V.I. Lenin, "Letters on Tactics," April 1917
And the Paris Commune, Brother Davidson, was the dictatorship of the proletariat. In an article for Pravda at about this time, Lenin formulated the question in a manner identical to that of Trotsky:
"We are for a strong revolutionary government....The question is--what class is making this revolution? A revolution against whom?
"Against tsarism? In that sense most of Russia's landowners and capitalists today are revolutionaries....
"Against the landowners? In this sense most of the peasants, even most of the well-to-do peasants, that is, probably nine-tenths of the population in Russia, are revolutionaries. Very likely, some of the capitalists, too are prepared to become revolutionaries on the grounds that the landowners cannot be saved anyway....
"Against the capitalists? Now that is the real issue. That is the crux of the matter, because without a revolution against the capitalists, all that prattle about 'peace without annexations' and the speedy termination of the war by such a peace is either naivete and ignorance, or stupidity and deception....
"The leaders of the petty bourgeoisie--the intellectuals, the Prosperous peasants, the present parties of the Narodniks...and the Mensheviks--are not at present in favor of a revolution against the capitalists....
"The conclusion is obvious: only assumption of power by the proletariat, backed by the semi-proletarians, can give the country a really strong and really revolutionary government."
--V. I. Lenin, "A Strong Revolutionary Government," May 1917
It is true that Lenin both at this time and later occasionally referred to the soviets in the period February-October 1917 as an expression of the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry," but those soviets did not hold state power. The struggle for "All Power to the Soviets" was, as Lenin put it, the struggle against the petty bourgeoisie, which did not wish to struggle against capitalism. And the state which resulted from the October Revolution was the dictatorship of the working class, supported by the peasantry. From 1917 on Lenin never implied that there could be such a creature as a state of two classes, such as envisioned by Stalin and Mao. As he put it in his polemic against Kautsky, "The Soviets are the Russian form of the proletarian dictatorship" ("The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky," 1918).
Slogans and programs of revolutionary parties have a real meaning in the class struggle: they call for certain courses of action and oppose others. Kamenev who in April led the fight to retain the slogan of the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" in October opposed the revolutionary insurrection, and after the successful uprising actually resigned from the Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars in protest. In this behavior there was at least a semblance of consistency.
But Davidson and Stalinists everywhere would have us believe that the "Old Bolshevik" program was confirmed by the October Revolution! Behind this deception lies a purpose, namely to justify the anti-revolutionary policies of Stalinism. It is always "too soon" for socialist demands, we must always go through a "democratic stage" before the peasants can seize the land and the proletariat can expropriate the expropriators. As a true proletarian revolutionary, Lenin learned from the experience of the 1917 revolution, advancing a new program when the inadequacy of the old one had been clearly revealed. But what can one say of people who not only refuse to assimilate these lessons but insist on proclaiming that black is white? In the mouth of Stalin in 1927 the slogan of a "democratic dictatorship" was a justification for ordering the Chinese Communist Party to give up its arms just as Chiang Kai-shek prepared to massacre thousands of Communists and militant workers. Today, when the same slogan is used to justify support for "anti-imperialists" such as Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, it will have the same result--annihilation of the revolutionaries and strangulation of the revolution. The choice is posed world-wide: Either socialism or barbarism, there is no middle ground!
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
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The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited
These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]
Reply to the Guardian
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED
THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION
In their tireless efforts to betray the struggles of the workers and peasants, the Stalinists must continue to maintain a pretense of revolutionism. Yet their doctrines stand counterposed to the line of Marxism. This presents them with a dilemma, which they can only resolve by resorting to systematic lies about the Trotskyists. This goes from distortions of the political positions of Trotsky (as well as Marx and Lenin), to denying Trotsky's leading role as the military organizer of the October Revolution and accusing him of carrying out espionage for the Mikado! While many of the specific charges leveled against Zinoviev, Bukharin and other leading Bolsheviks accused of Trotskyism during the Moscow Trials were admitted by Khrushchev in 1956 to be total fabrications, the method remains. Today we are witnessing a widespread revival of the "Stalin School of Falsification" especially on the part of the various Maoist groups. Just as Stalin in his day needed a cover to justify his crimes against the working class, so today must the Maoists resort to vicious slander in order to cover for their counterrevolutionary policies in Bangladesh, Indonesia and elsewhere. This series is intended as a reply to these lies and an introduction to some of the basic concepts of Trotskyism, as they have developed in the struggle against Stalinist reformism during the past fifty years.
The struggle between the reformist line of Stalinism and the revolutionary policies of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky is no academic matter of interest only to historians. The counterrevolutionary policies of the "Great Organizer of Defeats" (Stalin) led not only to the assassination of Trotsky by an agent of Stalin's GPU and the murder of tens of thousands of Russian Left Oppositionists in the Siberian concentration camps, but also to the strangulation of the Chinese (1927), German (1933), French (1936), Spanish (1937), Indonesian (1965) and French (1968) revolutions as well as the sellout "peace agreements" of the Vietnamese Stalinists in 1946 and 1954. The struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism is literally a matter of life and death for the revolutionary movement and must be given the closest attention by militants who are seeking the road to Marxism.
What is the Permanent Revolution?
At the heart of this conflict is the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. This theory, first advanced at the time of the 1905 Russian revolution, was summarized by Trotsky in his article "Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution," written in 1939:
"...the complete victory of the democratic revolution in Russia is conceivable only in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which would inevitably place on the order of the day not only the democratic but socialistic tasks as well, would at the same time give a powerful impetus to the international socialist revolution. Only the victory of the proletariat in the West could protect Russia from bourgeois restoration and assure it the possibility of rounding out the establishment of socialism."
It is this theory which Davidson and the Stalinists reject when they say that "Trotsky's views on the course of the Russian revolution, like those of the Mensheviks, were refuted by history" (Guardian, 4 April 1973). In fact, only because the uprising never reached the seizure of power was Trotsky's theory not confirmed in practice in 1905. The course of the Russian Revolution of 1917 fully verified this theory. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat, embodied in soviet power, could solve the questions of land and peace, as well as liberating oppressed nations from czarist rule. Moreover, a careful analysis of Lenin's views in 1905 and 1917 shows that he came over to agreement with all the essential aspects of Trotsky's formulation, and abandoned his own earlier slogan of a "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry."
The Stalinist claim that Lenin still stood for a "democratic" revolution in 1917 and called for "socialism in one country" is pure fabrication. Likewise, their accusation that Trotsky's slogan was "Down with the Czar, For a Workers Government," supposedly ignoring the peasantry, was repeatedly denied by Trotsky. The slogan of permanent revolution was, rather, for the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the peasantry.
In Trotsky's view, because of the uneven and combined development of the world economy, the bourgeoisie of the backward countries is tightly bound to the feudal and imperialist interests, thereby preventing it from carrying out the fundamental tasks of the bourgeois revolution--democracy, agrarian revolution and national emancipation. In the presence of an aroused peasantry and a combative working class, each of these goals would directly threaten the political and economic dominance of the capitalist class. The tasks of the bourgeois revolution can be solved only by the alliance of the peasantry and the proletariat.
Marxism holds that there can only be one dominant class in the state. Since, as the Communist Manifesto states, the proletariat is the only consistently revolutionary class, this alliance must take the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the peasantry. In carrying out the democratic tasks of the revolution, the proletarian state must inevitably make "despotic inroads into the rights of bourgeois property" (e.g., expropriation of landlords), and thus the revolution directly passes over to socialist tasks, without pausing at any arbitrary "stages" or, as Lenin put it, without a "Chinese wall" being erected between the bourgeois and proletarian phases. Thus the revolution becomes permanent, eventually leading to the complete abolition of classes (socialism).
But socialism is the product of the liberation of the productive forces at the highest level of capitalist development: classes can be abolished only by eliminating want, that is, scarcity. Thus, while the dictatorship of the proletariat may be established in an isolated and backward country, socialism must be the joint achievement of at least several advanced countries. For these complementary reasons the revolution must extend and deepen itself--or else perish. Thus the opposition between Trotsky's "permanent revolution" and Stalin's "socialism in one country" is in reality the opposition between socialism on a world scale and the most brutal regime of bourgeois-feudal reaction (barbarism); there is no middle road.
While the theory of permanent revolution was the achievement of Leon Trotsky, the concept was first introduced by Karl Marx in 1850. Davidson, in his effort to cloak Stalin's theory of "socialism in one country" with the mantle of Marxism, maintains that Marx's use of the phrase "permanent revolution" was simply a general observation about class struggle continuing until socialism:
"Thus the revolution is 'permanent' in two ways. First in looking toward the future, its course is one of uninterrupted class struggle until classes themselves are abolished. Second, looking back historically once classes are abolished, the revolution is permanent in the sense that there is no longer class struggle and the seizure of power and domination of one class by another."
--Guardian, 4 April 1973
At this level of abstraction, it is no wonder that Davidson concludes that differences arise only "in the particularity of the question." But let us take a look first at what Marx actually said:
"While the democratic petty-bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible, and with the achievement, at most, of the above demands, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, until the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians of these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of existing society but the foundation of a new one."
--Karl Marx, "Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League," 1850
This is in fact a powerful polemic, 75 years in advance, against Stalin's sophistry about "socialism in one country." Trotsky's theory is a further development of these fundamental propositions in the epoch of imperialism, when capitalism has penetrated throughout the backward regions and the objective prerequisites for socialism on a world scale already exist (thereby endangering even the young bourgeoisies of the ex-colonial countries).
Revolution by Stages: Germany 1848
According to the Stalinists the chief error of Trotskyism is the failure to recognize the necessity of "stages" of the revolution, in particular the democratic stage as opposed to the socialist stage. One of Davidson's more illustrious predecessors wrote (a few years before Stalin murdered him as a "Trotskyite"!):
"Comrade Trotsky put the dictatorship of the working class at the beginning of the process, but did not see the steps and transitions that led to this dictatorship; he ignored the concrete relation of forces...he did not see the stages of the revolution...."
--N. Bukharin, "On the Theory of Permanent Revolution," 1925
Let us consider this "theory" of two-stage revolution, the "particularity" of the permanent revolution. Did Marx, perhaps, have such a theory? Marx, of course, rigorously distinguished the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions as to their social content, since they represent different epochs of historical development. But even in the mid-19th century it was becoming clear that the bourgeoisie was too weak and the proletariat too powerful for there to exist a "Chinese wall" between the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. Distinct in social content, they would be closely linked historically. The German revolution of 1848 made this link particularly clear. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote:
"Communists pay special attention to Germany. There are two reasons for this. First of all, Germany is upon the eve of a bourgeois revolution. Secondly, this revolution will take place under comparatively advanced conditions as far as the general civilization of Europe is concerned, and when the German proletariat is much more highly developed than was the English proletariat in the seventeenth century or the French proletariat in the eighteenth. Consequently, in nineteenth-century Germany, the bourgeois revolution can only be the immediate precursor of a proletarian revolution."
Marx did not believe that the working class could directly achieve victory in 1848, but that it would be forced to support the liberal bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie insofar as they fought against feudal-absolutist reaction. But even in this pre-imperialist period, when the proletariat was quite weak and politically dominated by the artisan and democratic petty-bourgeois interests, he counseled the workers to "simultaneously erect their own revolutionary workers' government hard by the new official government" in order to oppose their previous ally, as well as bring about "the arming of the whole proletariat."
Marx's prediction that proletarian revolution would closely follow the bourgeois revolutions of 1848 was not borne out. But neither were there successful bourgeois revolutions, precisely because the fear that proletarian revolution would break out if the least step were taken to rouse the masses drove the liberals into the arms of Prussian and Austrian reaction. Tied to the feudalists by a common dread of social revolution, the liberals strove not to overthrow the monarchy (as did the French bourgeoisie in 1789), but to share power with the feudalists. The German bourgeoisie could not rise above the level of a "shopocracy," as Engels put it.
Revolution by Stages: Russia 1905
The Russian revolution of 1905 again raised the question of permanent revolution, but in much sharper form. The Russian bourgeoisie was far weaker even than the German. For centuries the main characteristic of Russian development was its primitiveness and slowness, resulting from Russia's unfavorable geographic location and sparse population. Capitalist development in the northern empire was primarily imported from the West by the autocratic state, simply grafted on to the existing feudal economy. Thus while a modern industrial proletariat was forming in the main cities, concentrated in large factories which utilized the most advanced techniques, the town handicrafts and early forms of manufacture which had formed the economic base for the bourgeoisie in the West, never had time to develop. With large industry primarily in the hands of European capital and state banks, the Russian capitalist class remained small in number, isolated, half-foreign and without historical traditions. Moreover, it remained tied by a thousand strands to the feudalist-absolutist state and the landed aristocracy. A bourgeois-led revolution which could solve the tasks of democracy, agrarian revolution and national emancipation, was utterly out of the question. And yet the tasks of the bourgeois revolution remained.
Faced with this reality the two wings of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party took sharply opposed positions. The Mensheviks with scholastic formalism and utter spinelessness deduced from the democratic character of the initial tasks of the revolution the "strategy" of an alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie. In a speech at the "Unification Congress" of the RSDLP (1906), Axelrod, a leading Menshevik, remarked:
"The social relations of Russia have ripened only for a bourgeois revolution....While this general political lawlessness persists, we must not even so much as mention the direct fight of the proletariat against other classes for political power....It is fighting for the conditions of bourgeois development. Objective historical conditions doom our proletariat to an inevitable collaboration with the bourgeoisie against our common enemy."
This conclusion was derived by simply mechanically pasting the classical scheme of European (and more particularly French) development onto Russian conditions, with the implications that proletarian revolution could only come after many decades of capitalist development. The kernel of the Menshevik position was captured by Plekhanov's remark that "we must prize the support of the non-proletarian parties and not drive them away from us by tactless behavior." To this Lenin responded: "...the liberals among the landed gentry will forgive you millions of 'tactless' acts, but they will never forgive incitements to take away their land."
As against Plekhanov's coalition with the bourgeoisie, Lenin called for a bloc with the peasantry to carry out the agrarian revolution. This was codified in his formula of a "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry":
"We must be perfectly certain in our minds as to what real social forces are opposed to 'tsarism....The big bourgeoisie, the landlords, the factory owners, and 'society,' which follows the Osvobozhdeniye [the liberals'] lead, cannot be such a force....We know that owing to their class position they are incapable of waging a decisive struggle against tsarism; they are too heavily fettered by private property, by capital and land to enter into a decisive struggle. They stand in too great need of tsarism, with its bureaucratic, police, and military forces for use against the proletariat and the peasantry, to want it to be destroyed. No, the only force capable of gaining 'a decisive victory over tsarism' means the establishment of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." [emphasis in original]
--V.I. Lenin, "Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution," 1905
This policy was irreconcilably opposed to the insipid liberalism of the Mensheviks, instead fanning the flames of peasant revolt and leading the proletariat in a "tactless" assault on the czarist autocracy. But at the same time he insisted on the characterization of the revolution as bourgeois, with power to be placed in the hands of the peasantry and the future opened to a flowering of capitalist development:
"Marxists are absolutely convinced of the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution. What does that mean? It means that the democratic reforms in the political system, and the social and economic reforms that have become a necessity for Russia, do not in themselves imply the undermining of bourgeois rule, on the contrary, they will, for the first time, really clear the ground for a wide and rapid, European and not Asiatic, development of capitalism; they will, for the first time, make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class."
--Ibid.
Trotsky's view, quoted at the beginning of this article, was distinct from those of the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, though immeasurably closer to the latter. As he later wrote:
"The theory of the permanent revolution, which originated in 1905...pointed out that the democratic tasks of the backward bourgeois nations lead directly, in our epoch, to the dictatorship of the proletariat and that the dictatorship of the proletariat puts socialist tasks on the order of the day."
--"Permanent Revolution," 1929
According to Davidson, Lenin "insisted that the revolution would develop in stages" while Trotsky supposedly completely ignored the bourgeois-democratic stage. This is simply a smokescreen. Trotsky never denied the bourgeois character of the initial phases of the revolution in the sense of its immediate historical tasks, but only in the sense of its driving forces and perspectives:
"Already in 1905, the Petersburg workers called their soviet a proletarian government. This designation passed into the everyday language of that time and was completely embodied in the program of the struggle of the working class for power. At the same time, we set up against Tsarism an elaborated program of political democracy (universal suffrage, republic, militia, etc.). We could act in no other way. Political democracy is a necessary stage in the development of the working masses--with the highly important reservation that in one case this stage lasts for decades, while in another, the revolutionary situation permits the masses to emancipate themselves from the prejudices of political democracy even before its institutions have been converted into reality." [emphasis in original]
--L. D. Trotsky, "Introduction" to The Year 1905, 1922
Davidson again tries to cloud the issues by claiming that Trotsky was "hostile to the peasantry" while "Lenin's view is directly_ opposite." This is pure fabrication. It is true that Trotsky dismissed out of hand the idea that the peasantry as a whole could be a "socialist ally" of the working class:
"From the very first moment after its taking power, the proletariat will have to find support in the antagonisms between the village poor and the village rich, between the agricultural proletariat and the agricultural bourgeoisie."
--L. D. Trotsky, "Results and Prospects," 1905
But in this respect, Lenin's view was identical:
"The struggle against the bureaucrat and the landlord can and must be waged together with all the peasants, even the well-to-do and the middle peasants. On the other hand, it is only together with the rural proletariat that the struggle against the bourgeoisie, and therefore against the well-to-do peasants too, can be properly waged."
--V.I. Lenin, "Petty-Bourgeois and Proletarian Socialism," 1905
The dispute between Lenin and Trotsky was not over whether or not the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution could be skipped or whether an alliance between the workers and peasants was necessary, but concerned the political mechanics of the collaboration of the proletariat and peasantry, the degree of independence of the latter. Trotsky pointed out (as had been shown by all past revolutionary experience, as well as the writings of Marx and Engels) that because of its intermediate position and heterogeneity of its social composition, the peasantry as a class was incapable of taking an independent role or forming its own independent party. It was compelled to follow the lead of either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.
Revolution in Stages: 1917
It is no accident that Davidson's articles hardly mention the 1917 October Revolution, going instead from the disputes in 1905 over the role of the peasantry straight to the question of "socialism in one country." Indeed, had Davidson reproduced Lenin's writings from this period he would have had to print statements radically different from Lenin's view of the 1905-1907 period. Before Lenin's arrival from Europe on 4 April the majority of the Bolshevik party called for "critical support" to the bourgeois Provisional Government of Prince Lvov, which had taken power after the February revolution overthrew the czar. Stalin was the chief spokesman for this viewpoint at the March 1917 Bolshevik Party Conference. In his report on the attitude to the Provisional Government, he said:
"...the Provisional Government has in fact taken the role of fortifier of the conquests of the revolutionary people....It is not to our advantage at present to force events, hastening the process of repelling the bourgeois layers, who will in the future inevitably withdraw from us. It is necessary for us to gain time by putting a brake on the splitting away of the middle-bourgeois layers....Insofar as the Provisional Government fortifies the steps of the revolution, to that extent we must support it; but insofar as it is counterrevolutionary, support to the Provisional Government is not permissible."
--"Draft Protocol of the March 1917 All-Russian Conference of Party Workers"
While the bulk of the party leadership called for "completing the bourgeois-democratic revolution," Lenin insisted that the only revolutionary policy was calling for the dictatorship of the proletariat. In taking this position he came over to Trotsky's program of permanent revolution, and was accused of Trotskyism by the right wing. This required an ideological rearming of the party and at one point Lenin threatened to resign from the Central Committee in order to take the struggle to the ranks when his "April Theses" were initially voted down by the leadership. The key passage in these theses stated:
"The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution--which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organization of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants."
--V.I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution," 1917
In direct opposition to Stalin's position of less than a week earlier, Lenin demanded "No Support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear..." (Ibid.). The opposition to Lenin was led by Y. Kamenev who claimed that "the bourgeois-democratic revolution is not completed....As for Comrade Lenin's general scheme, it appears to us unacceptable, inasmuch as it proceeds from the assumption that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed, and builds on the immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution." In his "Letters on Tactics" Lenin replied to this charge:
"After the revolution [of February-March 1917], the power is in the hands of a different class, a new class, namely, the bourgeoisie....
"To this extent, the bourgeois, or the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed.
"But at this point we hear a clamor of protest from people who readily call themselves 'old Bolsheviks.' Didn't we always maintain, they say, that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed only by the 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry'?...My answer is: The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently....
"'The Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies'--there you have the 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry' already accomplished in reality.
"This formula is already antiquated....
"A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defensist, internationalist, 'Communist' elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small-proprietor or petty-bourgeois elements....
"The person who now only speaks of a 'revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry' is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of 'Bolshevik' pre-revolutionary antiques....
"Comrade Kamenev...has repeated the bourgeois prejudice about the Paris Commune having wanted to introduce socialism 'immediately.' This is not so. The Commune, unfortunately, was too slow in introducing socialism. The real essence of the Commune is...in the creation of a state of a special type. Such a state has already arisen in Russia, it is the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies!"
--V.I. Lenin, "Letters on Tactics," April 1917
And the Paris Commune, Brother Davidson, was the dictatorship of the proletariat. In an article for Pravda at about this time, Lenin formulated the question in a manner identical to that of Trotsky:
"We are for a strong revolutionary government....The question is--what class is making this revolution? A revolution against whom?
"Against tsarism? In that sense most of Russia's landowners and capitalists today are revolutionaries....
"Against the landowners? In this sense most of the peasants, even most of the well-to-do peasants, that is, probably nine-tenths of the population in Russia, are revolutionaries. Very likely, some of the capitalists, too are prepared to become revolutionaries on the grounds that the landowners cannot be saved anyway....
"Against the capitalists? Now that is the real issue. That is the crux of the matter, because without a revolution against the capitalists, all that prattle about 'peace without annexations' and the speedy termination of the war by such a peace is either naivete and ignorance, or stupidity and deception....
"The leaders of the petty bourgeoisie--the intellectuals, the Prosperous peasants, the present parties of the Narodniks...and the Mensheviks--are not at present in favor of a revolution against the capitalists....
"The conclusion is obvious: only assumption of power by the proletariat, backed by the semi-proletarians, can give the country a really strong and really revolutionary government."
--V. I. Lenin, "A Strong Revolutionary Government," May 1917
It is true that Lenin both at this time and later occasionally referred to the soviets in the period February-October 1917 as an expression of the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry," but those soviets did not hold state power. The struggle for "All Power to the Soviets" was, as Lenin put it, the struggle against the petty bourgeoisie, which did not wish to struggle against capitalism. And the state which resulted from the October Revolution was the dictatorship of the working class, supported by the peasantry. From 1917 on Lenin never implied that there could be such a creature as a state of two classes, such as envisioned by Stalin and Mao. As he put it in his polemic against Kautsky, "The Soviets are the Russian form of the proletarian dictatorship" ("The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky," 1918).
Slogans and programs of revolutionary parties have a real meaning in the class struggle: they call for certain courses of action and oppose others. Kamenev who in April led the fight to retain the slogan of the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" in October opposed the revolutionary insurrection, and after the successful uprising actually resigned from the Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars in protest. In this behavior there was at least a semblance of consistency.
But Davidson and Stalinists everywhere would have us believe that the "Old Bolshevik" program was confirmed by the October Revolution! Behind this deception lies a purpose, namely to justify the anti-revolutionary policies of Stalinism. It is always "too soon" for socialist demands, we must always go through a "democratic stage" before the peasants can seize the land and the proletariat can expropriate the expropriators. As a true proletarian revolutionary, Lenin learned from the experience of the 1917 revolution, advancing a new program when the inadequacy of the old one had been clearly revealed. But what can one say of people who not only refuse to assimilate these lessons but insist on proclaiming that black is white? In the mouth of Stalin in 1927 the slogan of a "democratic dictatorship" was a justification for ordering the Chinese Communist Party to give up its arms just as Chiang Kai-shek prepared to massacre thousands of Communists and militant workers. Today, when the same slogan is used to justify support for "anti-imperialists" such as Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, it will have the same result--annihilation of the revolutionaries and strangulation of the revolution. The choice is posed world-wide: Either socialism or barbarism, there is no middle ground!
Thursday, June 02, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Youth-Party Relations in the Communist Youth International-Lessons from History (1974)
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Youth-Party Relations in the Communist Youth International-Lessons from History
From Young Spartacist, No. 21, January-February 1974
The question of youth-party relations is an important aspect of Leninist organizational traditions. Many of those socialist youth sections that operated autonomously from the Social-Democratic Parties became pro-Bolshevik in WWI and the nuclei for the European Communist Parties. The heated discussion that took place later in the Communist Youth International over youth-party relations brought into question the basic Leninist conception of the vanguard party. Most of this history is today ignored by ostensibly revolutionary youth organizations like the Workers League’s Young Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party’s Young Socialist Alliance because they stand in the tradition of Stalinist or social-democratic conceptions of youth work, unlike the RCY, which stands in the Leninist tradition.
*******
In August 1914 the majorities of the major Western European Social Democratic Parties capitulated to pro-war sentiment, national chauvinism, and the pressures of their respective bourgeoisies. They pledged themselves to national defense, support of the imperialist war—and ultimately joined bourgeois governments. The statements of internationalism and commitments to the struggle against war— from the Amsterdam Conference of 1904 to the Basle Conference of 1912—became a dead letter. However, despite the capitulation of the party leaderships, a significant section of the loosely organized socialist youth retained an internationalist position. Threatened most directly by the imperialist war—for which they were the intended cannon fodder—and maintaining a revolutionary élan foreign to the bureaucracies in countries like Germany, France and Belgium, many sections of the youth refused to accept the Burgfrieden (social peace in a "beleaguered fortress") of the Eberts, Vanderveldes and Guesdes, as well as rejecting the ineffectual petty-bourgeois pacifism of Kautsky, who complained that "the International is founded for the purpose of peace and not for wartime."
This anti-war stance was not universal among the socialist youth. Major sections remained loyal to their reformist organizations—and thus tied themselves to their own imperialist bourgeoisies. Ludwig Frank of the South German Youth Guard became a model and martyr for the German social-patriotic youth by volunteering for the Kaiser’s army, and falling promptly on a French battlefield. The Austrian youth under Dannenberg accepted the Kautskyist stance of passive opposition to the war—and the suspension of internationalism for the duration. (Dannenberg hung a black-bordered sign on the door of the Youth Bureau in Vienna which read, "Temporarily closed on account of war.") But significant sections of the youth did not capitulate.
The political differentiation among the European youth groups can at least partially be laid to differences in historical development. The first socialist youth organization, the Belgian Young Guards (formed in 1886) was formed independently of the Social Democrats, for basically political motives, i.e., the desire to engage in anti-militarist agitation and propaganda.
The socialist youth groups formed in Sweden (1895), Switzerland (1900), Italy (1901), Norway (1902), Spain (1903) and southern Germany (1904) were based on the Belgian model—they were highly political and independent from the adult parties. The youth groups formed in Austria (1894) and northern Germany (1904-05) were concerned, primarily with improving the economic position of young workers and with raising their living standards. The youth organizations formed after 1907, as in Holland, France and the united youth organization in Germany (following Liebknecht’s arrest and removal from the southern German youth leadership by the Social-Democratic Party leadership) were based more on the less political Austrian model than on the Belgian one. The youth groups formed for economic reasons were usually formed and controlled by the socialist parties. During WWI, the youth organizations based on the Belgian model in general upheld their opposition to imperialist war and commitment to internationalism while the German and Austrian youth caved in to social chauvinism along with their parent parties.
The Berne Conference, 1915
After a process of regroupment, led initially by the Swiss, Italian, Swedish and Norwegian youth organizations, the oppositional youth called the first international conference since the outbreak of the war—at Berne, Switzerland from 4-6 April 1915.
The Berne conference represented a confusion of centrist and revolutionary political tendencies, and like the Zimmerwald conference which followed it, its resolution was tainted by social pacifism, i.e., the dominance of pacifist anti-war perspectives over a class-struggle approach. The cutting edge of the difference between the centrists and the left (the Bolsheviks) at the Zimmerwald conference was Lenin’s slogan, "Turn the Imperialist War into a Civil War," whose concrete and immediate agitational demands were for the anti-war general strike and socialist propaganda in the army.
The Berne conference was a step forward of considerable significance. It represented a reaffirmation of internationalism in the face of nationalist war sentiment. It rejected the class collaboration of the social-democratic majorities; and, most significantly, it broke relations with the Bureau of the Second International, which, as Rosa Luxemburg was to remark, had become a "rotting corpse." Further, it established a new bureau of the Youth International, under the leadership of the left-wing German-Swiss, Willi Munzenberg. The Bolshevik organization, intervening in the conference, argued for the position of revolutionary defeatism. (Early on, the Bolshevik delegation had walked out over a dispute on the allotment of votes, but returned on the insistence of Lenin, who wanted to lose no chance of influencing the left-wing socialist youth towards a consistently revolutionary position.) Although the Bolshevik position was not accepted by the conference, it had considerable impact on the young militants.
The conference also established the publication of Die Jugendinternationale (The Youth International), which was to appear for the next three years and carry many articles by the representatives of the revolutionary left. The early issues of The Youth International showed the same political confusion as had characterized the Berne conference, carrying articles by pacifist reformists like Bernstein, as well as articles representing the centrists and the revolutionary left. Setting the tone, however, was the major article by Karl Liebknecht in the first two issues. Liebknecht’s article, "Antimilitarismus," was an impassioned indictment of the war: the militarization of state and factory as well as barracks and trenches; the lies of the imperialists, pandering Illusions of self-determination and self-defense. It was also a call for bitter and decisive opposition on all levels, for the class unity of the proletariat against the war—and for a new, revolutionary international. Although not the only voice raised in the early Youth International, it was the clearest, and soon dominated the rest.
Writing of The Youth International in December 1916, Lenin heralded its struggle for proletarian internationalism:
"With this state of affairs in Europe [the betrayal of the major social democracies], there falls on the League of Socialist Youth Organizations the tremendous, grateful but difficult task of fighting for revolutionary internationalism, for true socialism and against the prevailing opportunism which has deserted to the side of the imperialist bourgeoisie. The Youth International has published a number of good articles in defense of revolutionary internationalism, and the magazine as a whole is permeated with a fine spirit of intense hatred for the betrayers of socialism, the ‘defenders of the fatherland’ in the present war, and with an earnest desire to wipe out the corroding influence of chauvinism and opportunism in the international labor movement."
—Lenin, Works, Vol. 23, p. 163-64.
Lenin did not minimize the political differences lying between the Bolsheviks and the youth leagues and noted their lack of theoretical clarity, but he stressed the difference between this political unclarity and the betrayal of the hardened opportunists:
"Adults who lay claim to lead and teach the proletariat, but actually mislead it, are one thing: against such people a ruthless struggle must be waged. Organizations of youth, however, which openly declare that they are still learning, that their main task is to train party workers for the socialist parties, are quite another thing. We must be patient with their faults and strive to correct them gradually, mainly by persuasion, and not by fighting them."
—Works, Vol. 23, p. 164
Lenin strongly recommended the publication to the attention of Bolshevik cadre.
Lenin Calls for Independence of European Youth Groups
During this period, Lenin called for the "complete independence" of the European youth leagues, while reserving the right of "complete freedom of comradely criticism of their errors" (Works, Vol. 23, p. 64). This position must be viewed in its historical context. Because of the egregious betrayal of the Social Democracy, the first duty of revolutionaries had to be the separation of the proletarian internationalist elements from the "rotting corpse" of the Second International. It was impermissible to accept responsibility for the social chauvinists through the disciplined acceptance of their policies. In the major combatant countries of Western Europe there existed no revolutionary parties (with the exception of revolutionary propaganda groups like the Spartacus League and the Bremen Left in Germany). The discipline of a revolutionary is to the revolutionary movement, its principles and program—and to organizations which embody that program and continuity.
Subordination of the youth leagues to the social chauvinist leaders of the major European parties (with the exception of the Bolsheviks) meant their subjugation to the barracks discipline of their respective imperialist bourgeoisies. Thus Lenin hailed Liebknecht's vote against war credits in the German Reichstag as an act of discipline towards the revolution, although it represented a breach of the formal discipline of the German Social-Democratic Party.
The position of the revolutionary youth was a difficult one. They were forced to substitute themselves to a considerable degree for ‘revolutionary’ parties which did not exist. Substitute, because they generally lacked the experience and political clarity to become such parties themselves, although they helped to provide the nuclei of such parties in the period after 1917. Their "complete independence" was not a virtue in itself—quite the reverse—it was a byproduct of the Second International's betrayal of its leading role in the proletariat. Thus Liebknecht participated in the illegal conference of the oppositional German socialist youth in Jena, on 23-24 April 1916, and wrote the major political document of the conference, "The Tasks of the Proletarian Youth Movement." The document itself was a model of revolutionary fervor and called for "the proletarian youth movement to struggle against the war with all forces and all means, and to utilize the conditions created [by the war] to accelerate the collapse of capitalist class rule" (Liebknecht, Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, VIII, p. 609).
But such cadre were in desperately short supply, and Liebknecht himself was arrested barely a week after the conference (for his call for revolutionary defeatism during the May 1st workers demonstration in Berlin). He remained imprisoned until the November revolution in 1918, and his guiding influence was thus lost to the German—and international—socialist youth for most of the duration of the war.
In the uprisings and revolutions following the October Revolution—in Berlin, Munich, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere—the socialist youth, like the proletariat as a whole, paid a bitter price for the non-existence of experienced and hardened revolutionary parties. But the lack of revolutionary leadership was least of all attributable to the oppositional youth leagues, of whom Liebknecht wrote:
"Its ranks were decimated, its leaders sent to the trenches, imprisoned in ‘protective custody,’ jail and prison. Class justice raged more mercilessly over them than upon the adults, and swept away many a warm young life to the hecatombs of slaughter. The free [oppositional socialist] youth, however, remained undaunted, and defied their enemies."
—Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, VIII, p. 609
Formation of the Communist Youth International
This bitter experience and the Socialist youth’s increasing understanding of the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary program and analysis of the Second International’s collapse led to a coming together, of the European youth and the Russian Communist youth. On 20 November 1919, in the back room of a beer hall In Berlin, guarded by sentinels and pickets of the Berlin youth, the first Congress of the Communist Youth International (CYI) was held. There were present delegates from 12 countries, representing 200,000-300,000 members when the congress was called to order by Willi Munzenberg—recently released from prison. (By 1921, according to Munzenberg’s estimate, the number of affiliated sections rose to 15, with a membership of approximately 800,000.)
However, for some time the nature of the relationship of the CYI to the Communist International (CI) remained undefined. On 20 November 1920, the Russian Young Communist League proposed to the Executive Committee of the CYI the codification of youth-party relations as "political subordination and organizational independence." The majorities of other youth leagues, however, mindful of their recent experience with the betrayal of the Second International, were at first unwilling to accept such a relationship. They had generalized the conjunctural historical role they had played into a conception of an inherently vanguard role for the youth, or, at least, a political watchdog role for the youth in relation to the party.
It was not until the Second Congress of the CYI that the formula supported by the Russian League was adopted. The Congress began on 6 April in Jena (where the conference of the German oppositional youth had taken place in 1916), but was moved on 10 April for security reasons to Berlin. Finally, on the instruction of the Executive Committee of the CI (ECCI), the CYI Congress "continued" in Moscow from 9-23 June, immediately preceding the Third Congress of the CI.
The political struggle was sharp, both over youth-party relations and the "theory of the revolutionary offensive," the position of the left in the CI itself (grouped around Bela Kun, Maslow and Fischer), which was initially supported by the majority of the youth. This conception failed to recognize the relative capitalist restabilization which had ensued after the defeats of the 1918-20 period, and contended that continued frontal assault of the proletarian forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of world capitalism.
CI Resolution on Youth-Party Relations
The questions of "political subordination" and "the revolutionary offensive" were linked, since acceptance of the political supremacy of the CI meant disciplined acceptance of the tactics of regroupment and the united front, the laborious "winning of the masses" demanded by the CI leadership around Lenin and Trotsky. The political debate over the question in the CI itself was to prove very heated, with a large minority supporting the "lefts," and Lenin and Trotsky winning a majority only after a long struggle. The position of the Bolshevik majority and the Russian youth league, however, finally carried the conference. At the Third Congress of the CI, from 22 June to 12 July 1921, the following resolution on youth-party relations was accepted:
"The relation of Communist Youth Organizations to the Communist Parties is fundamentally different from that of the revolutionary youth organizations to the social democratic parties. In the common struggle for the quick accomplishment of the proletarian revolution the greatest unity and strictest centralization is necessary. The political direction and leadership can lie internationally only with the CI, and in the individual countries only with the national sections. It is the duty of the CYO’s to subordinate themselves to this political direction (program, tactics and political directives), and to integrate themselves into the common revolutionary front… The CYO’s, which have begun to organize their own ranks on the principles of the strictest centralization, will exercise iron discipline towards the CI as bearer and leader of the proletarian revolution. The CYO’s shall occupy themselves within its organizations with all political and tactical questions, will take a position, and work for these resolutions within, but never against, the CP of their country. In cases of serious differences of opinion between the CP’s and CYO’s the right of appeal to the ECCI (Executive Committee of the Communist International) shall be utilized. The surrender of their political independence means under no circumstances the renunciation of their organizational independence, which is indispensable on educational grounds."
—Resolution on the Communist International and the Communist Youth Movement
The political subordination of the youth to the party flows from the principle of discipline towards the revolutionary movement, and in the concrete instance the recognition that the CI was the bearer of revolutionary continuity and the revolutionary program. The CI Resolution placed the relationship of youth and party clearly in historical and political context:
"In some countries where the building of the communist parties is still in progress and the youth have just split from the Social Patriot and Centrist parties the slogan of absolute political and organizational independence of the youth movement dominates, and in this situation this slogan is objectively revolutionary. The slogan of absolute independence is wrong in those countries where strong Communist parties already exist and where the slogan of absolute independence is used by the Social Patriots and Centrists for misleading the youth against the communist youth organization. In these cases, the communist youth organization follows the program of the communist party."
—quoted in Richard Cornell, The Origins and Development of the Communist Youth International, 1914-1924 (PhD thesis), p. 316
The Danger of Dual Vanguardism
Whereas it was indispensable for the revolutionary youth organizations in WWI to separate themselves politically from the treacherous and class collaborationist leadership of the Second International, and struggle to develop and implement a revolutionary program, so conversely it was necessary for the youth to subordinate itself to a truly revolutionary international—which genuinely embodied the program of proletarian revolution. To do otherwise would be to engage in dual vanguardism—in the last analysis to challenge the International for the leadership of the class. The CI resolution is quite explicit:
"With the formation of the CI and the CP’s in the individual countries, the role of the proletarian youth organizations changes within the common proletarian movement. The continued existence of the CYO’s as politically independent and leading organizations would lead to the formation of two competing communist parties, differentiated merely by the age of their members."
—Resolution…
The recognition of the necessity of one vanguard, as the consistent revolutionary leadership of the proletariat, and the necessity of this role lying with the most tested, experienced and capable proletarian revolutionaries—i.e., with the CI and the communist parties, also implies the imperative of political differences being fought out internally, should they arise between party and youth. The youth must enjoy full rights of political discussion within its own ranks, and the possibility of influencing the party through its representatives. Conversely, the party must have the opportunity of exercising its guidance at all times upon the youth, of aiding the political maturation of the youth cadre, and maintaining its revolutionary orientation. Should a serious political difference develop, it is imperative that there be channels for its internal political resolution (thus, the right of appeal first to the Executive Committee of the CYI, then to the ECCI and finally to the World Congresses as the highest bodies of the common movement). The party is the concentrated subjective element of the proletarian revolution, and where principled agreement exists no breach is legitimate unless all avenues of internal discussion have been exhausted. Ultimately, of course, the final arbiter of any deep-going dispute is history—and its motor force, the class struggle—thus no organizational mechanism can guarantee that schisms will not develop. However, a split within the revolutionary vanguard—especially between party and youth, where it implies a terrible break in continuity—can only be justified by a deep-going principled counterposition. This was precisely the case with the Second International after 1914, but such an eventuality can only be considered as a last resort.
In order to provide for the requisite reciprocal political influence, the CI resolved:
"The close political co-operation of the CYO’s with the CP’s must also be expressed in a firm organizational connection between the organizations. A constant reciprocal representation of the organization and party leaderships, from the regional, district and local organizations down to the cells of the communist groups in industry and in the unions, as well as a strong reciprocal representation at all conferences and congresses is unconditionally required. In this way it will be possible for the CP’s to continually influence the political line and activity of the youth, and, on the other hand, for the youth to exercise an effective influence on the party."
—Resolution…
Importance of Organizational Independence for the Youth
The political subordination of the youth to the party—the proletarian vanguard—does not, however, invalidate the need for organizational independence for the youth. Lenin had outlined the reasons for this organizational independence long before the Third Comintern Congress, in his review of The Youth International:
"…the youth must of necessity advance to socialism in a different way, by other paths, in other forms, in other circumstances than their fathers. Incidentally, that is why we must decidedly favor organizational independence of the Youth League, not only because the opportunists fear such independence, but because of the very nature of the case. For unless they have complete independence, the youth will be unable either to train good socialists from their midst or prepare themselves to lead socialism forward."
—Works, Vol. 23, p. 164
Each generation faces a unique conjuncture of problems and tasks, which lead by different routes to the development of communist consciousness. While the fundamental causes are essentially identical (the contradictions of a capitalism which has outlived its progressiveness) the unique character of the process for each generation must be recognized and an organizationally flexible context provided for the development of creative revolutionary response. Although the youth needs the guidance of the party, it also needs to develop the initiative, judgment and political experience of its own leadership and cadre, and to do so vis-Ã -vis the specific problems facing the youth as a specially oppressed group within capitalist society. The primary educative mechanism of the youth is in its own experience of the class struggle.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Youth-Party Relations in the Communist Youth International-Lessons from History
From Young Spartacist, No. 21, January-February 1974
The question of youth-party relations is an important aspect of Leninist organizational traditions. Many of those socialist youth sections that operated autonomously from the Social-Democratic Parties became pro-Bolshevik in WWI and the nuclei for the European Communist Parties. The heated discussion that took place later in the Communist Youth International over youth-party relations brought into question the basic Leninist conception of the vanguard party. Most of this history is today ignored by ostensibly revolutionary youth organizations like the Workers League’s Young Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party’s Young Socialist Alliance because they stand in the tradition of Stalinist or social-democratic conceptions of youth work, unlike the RCY, which stands in the Leninist tradition.
*******
In August 1914 the majorities of the major Western European Social Democratic Parties capitulated to pro-war sentiment, national chauvinism, and the pressures of their respective bourgeoisies. They pledged themselves to national defense, support of the imperialist war—and ultimately joined bourgeois governments. The statements of internationalism and commitments to the struggle against war— from the Amsterdam Conference of 1904 to the Basle Conference of 1912—became a dead letter. However, despite the capitulation of the party leaderships, a significant section of the loosely organized socialist youth retained an internationalist position. Threatened most directly by the imperialist war—for which they were the intended cannon fodder—and maintaining a revolutionary élan foreign to the bureaucracies in countries like Germany, France and Belgium, many sections of the youth refused to accept the Burgfrieden (social peace in a "beleaguered fortress") of the Eberts, Vanderveldes and Guesdes, as well as rejecting the ineffectual petty-bourgeois pacifism of Kautsky, who complained that "the International is founded for the purpose of peace and not for wartime."
This anti-war stance was not universal among the socialist youth. Major sections remained loyal to their reformist organizations—and thus tied themselves to their own imperialist bourgeoisies. Ludwig Frank of the South German Youth Guard became a model and martyr for the German social-patriotic youth by volunteering for the Kaiser’s army, and falling promptly on a French battlefield. The Austrian youth under Dannenberg accepted the Kautskyist stance of passive opposition to the war—and the suspension of internationalism for the duration. (Dannenberg hung a black-bordered sign on the door of the Youth Bureau in Vienna which read, "Temporarily closed on account of war.") But significant sections of the youth did not capitulate.
The political differentiation among the European youth groups can at least partially be laid to differences in historical development. The first socialist youth organization, the Belgian Young Guards (formed in 1886) was formed independently of the Social Democrats, for basically political motives, i.e., the desire to engage in anti-militarist agitation and propaganda.
The socialist youth groups formed in Sweden (1895), Switzerland (1900), Italy (1901), Norway (1902), Spain (1903) and southern Germany (1904) were based on the Belgian model—they were highly political and independent from the adult parties. The youth groups formed in Austria (1894) and northern Germany (1904-05) were concerned, primarily with improving the economic position of young workers and with raising their living standards. The youth organizations formed after 1907, as in Holland, France and the united youth organization in Germany (following Liebknecht’s arrest and removal from the southern German youth leadership by the Social-Democratic Party leadership) were based more on the less political Austrian model than on the Belgian one. The youth groups formed for economic reasons were usually formed and controlled by the socialist parties. During WWI, the youth organizations based on the Belgian model in general upheld their opposition to imperialist war and commitment to internationalism while the German and Austrian youth caved in to social chauvinism along with their parent parties.
The Berne Conference, 1915
After a process of regroupment, led initially by the Swiss, Italian, Swedish and Norwegian youth organizations, the oppositional youth called the first international conference since the outbreak of the war—at Berne, Switzerland from 4-6 April 1915.
The Berne conference represented a confusion of centrist and revolutionary political tendencies, and like the Zimmerwald conference which followed it, its resolution was tainted by social pacifism, i.e., the dominance of pacifist anti-war perspectives over a class-struggle approach. The cutting edge of the difference between the centrists and the left (the Bolsheviks) at the Zimmerwald conference was Lenin’s slogan, "Turn the Imperialist War into a Civil War," whose concrete and immediate agitational demands were for the anti-war general strike and socialist propaganda in the army.
The Berne conference was a step forward of considerable significance. It represented a reaffirmation of internationalism in the face of nationalist war sentiment. It rejected the class collaboration of the social-democratic majorities; and, most significantly, it broke relations with the Bureau of the Second International, which, as Rosa Luxemburg was to remark, had become a "rotting corpse." Further, it established a new bureau of the Youth International, under the leadership of the left-wing German-Swiss, Willi Munzenberg. The Bolshevik organization, intervening in the conference, argued for the position of revolutionary defeatism. (Early on, the Bolshevik delegation had walked out over a dispute on the allotment of votes, but returned on the insistence of Lenin, who wanted to lose no chance of influencing the left-wing socialist youth towards a consistently revolutionary position.) Although the Bolshevik position was not accepted by the conference, it had considerable impact on the young militants.
The conference also established the publication of Die Jugendinternationale (The Youth International), which was to appear for the next three years and carry many articles by the representatives of the revolutionary left. The early issues of The Youth International showed the same political confusion as had characterized the Berne conference, carrying articles by pacifist reformists like Bernstein, as well as articles representing the centrists and the revolutionary left. Setting the tone, however, was the major article by Karl Liebknecht in the first two issues. Liebknecht’s article, "Antimilitarismus," was an impassioned indictment of the war: the militarization of state and factory as well as barracks and trenches; the lies of the imperialists, pandering Illusions of self-determination and self-defense. It was also a call for bitter and decisive opposition on all levels, for the class unity of the proletariat against the war—and for a new, revolutionary international. Although not the only voice raised in the early Youth International, it was the clearest, and soon dominated the rest.
Writing of The Youth International in December 1916, Lenin heralded its struggle for proletarian internationalism:
"With this state of affairs in Europe [the betrayal of the major social democracies], there falls on the League of Socialist Youth Organizations the tremendous, grateful but difficult task of fighting for revolutionary internationalism, for true socialism and against the prevailing opportunism which has deserted to the side of the imperialist bourgeoisie. The Youth International has published a number of good articles in defense of revolutionary internationalism, and the magazine as a whole is permeated with a fine spirit of intense hatred for the betrayers of socialism, the ‘defenders of the fatherland’ in the present war, and with an earnest desire to wipe out the corroding influence of chauvinism and opportunism in the international labor movement."
—Lenin, Works, Vol. 23, p. 163-64.
Lenin did not minimize the political differences lying between the Bolsheviks and the youth leagues and noted their lack of theoretical clarity, but he stressed the difference between this political unclarity and the betrayal of the hardened opportunists:
"Adults who lay claim to lead and teach the proletariat, but actually mislead it, are one thing: against such people a ruthless struggle must be waged. Organizations of youth, however, which openly declare that they are still learning, that their main task is to train party workers for the socialist parties, are quite another thing. We must be patient with their faults and strive to correct them gradually, mainly by persuasion, and not by fighting them."
—Works, Vol. 23, p. 164
Lenin strongly recommended the publication to the attention of Bolshevik cadre.
Lenin Calls for Independence of European Youth Groups
During this period, Lenin called for the "complete independence" of the European youth leagues, while reserving the right of "complete freedom of comradely criticism of their errors" (Works, Vol. 23, p. 64). This position must be viewed in its historical context. Because of the egregious betrayal of the Social Democracy, the first duty of revolutionaries had to be the separation of the proletarian internationalist elements from the "rotting corpse" of the Second International. It was impermissible to accept responsibility for the social chauvinists through the disciplined acceptance of their policies. In the major combatant countries of Western Europe there existed no revolutionary parties (with the exception of revolutionary propaganda groups like the Spartacus League and the Bremen Left in Germany). The discipline of a revolutionary is to the revolutionary movement, its principles and program—and to organizations which embody that program and continuity.
Subordination of the youth leagues to the social chauvinist leaders of the major European parties (with the exception of the Bolsheviks) meant their subjugation to the barracks discipline of their respective imperialist bourgeoisies. Thus Lenin hailed Liebknecht's vote against war credits in the German Reichstag as an act of discipline towards the revolution, although it represented a breach of the formal discipline of the German Social-Democratic Party.
The position of the revolutionary youth was a difficult one. They were forced to substitute themselves to a considerable degree for ‘revolutionary’ parties which did not exist. Substitute, because they generally lacked the experience and political clarity to become such parties themselves, although they helped to provide the nuclei of such parties in the period after 1917. Their "complete independence" was not a virtue in itself—quite the reverse—it was a byproduct of the Second International's betrayal of its leading role in the proletariat. Thus Liebknecht participated in the illegal conference of the oppositional German socialist youth in Jena, on 23-24 April 1916, and wrote the major political document of the conference, "The Tasks of the Proletarian Youth Movement." The document itself was a model of revolutionary fervor and called for "the proletarian youth movement to struggle against the war with all forces and all means, and to utilize the conditions created [by the war] to accelerate the collapse of capitalist class rule" (Liebknecht, Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, VIII, p. 609).
But such cadre were in desperately short supply, and Liebknecht himself was arrested barely a week after the conference (for his call for revolutionary defeatism during the May 1st workers demonstration in Berlin). He remained imprisoned until the November revolution in 1918, and his guiding influence was thus lost to the German—and international—socialist youth for most of the duration of the war.
In the uprisings and revolutions following the October Revolution—in Berlin, Munich, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere—the socialist youth, like the proletariat as a whole, paid a bitter price for the non-existence of experienced and hardened revolutionary parties. But the lack of revolutionary leadership was least of all attributable to the oppositional youth leagues, of whom Liebknecht wrote:
"Its ranks were decimated, its leaders sent to the trenches, imprisoned in ‘protective custody,’ jail and prison. Class justice raged more mercilessly over them than upon the adults, and swept away many a warm young life to the hecatombs of slaughter. The free [oppositional socialist] youth, however, remained undaunted, and defied their enemies."
—Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, VIII, p. 609
Formation of the Communist Youth International
This bitter experience and the Socialist youth’s increasing understanding of the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary program and analysis of the Second International’s collapse led to a coming together, of the European youth and the Russian Communist youth. On 20 November 1919, in the back room of a beer hall In Berlin, guarded by sentinels and pickets of the Berlin youth, the first Congress of the Communist Youth International (CYI) was held. There were present delegates from 12 countries, representing 200,000-300,000 members when the congress was called to order by Willi Munzenberg—recently released from prison. (By 1921, according to Munzenberg’s estimate, the number of affiliated sections rose to 15, with a membership of approximately 800,000.)
However, for some time the nature of the relationship of the CYI to the Communist International (CI) remained undefined. On 20 November 1920, the Russian Young Communist League proposed to the Executive Committee of the CYI the codification of youth-party relations as "political subordination and organizational independence." The majorities of other youth leagues, however, mindful of their recent experience with the betrayal of the Second International, were at first unwilling to accept such a relationship. They had generalized the conjunctural historical role they had played into a conception of an inherently vanguard role for the youth, or, at least, a political watchdog role for the youth in relation to the party.
It was not until the Second Congress of the CYI that the formula supported by the Russian League was adopted. The Congress began on 6 April in Jena (where the conference of the German oppositional youth had taken place in 1916), but was moved on 10 April for security reasons to Berlin. Finally, on the instruction of the Executive Committee of the CI (ECCI), the CYI Congress "continued" in Moscow from 9-23 June, immediately preceding the Third Congress of the CI.
The political struggle was sharp, both over youth-party relations and the "theory of the revolutionary offensive," the position of the left in the CI itself (grouped around Bela Kun, Maslow and Fischer), which was initially supported by the majority of the youth. This conception failed to recognize the relative capitalist restabilization which had ensued after the defeats of the 1918-20 period, and contended that continued frontal assault of the proletarian forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of world capitalism.
CI Resolution on Youth-Party Relations
The questions of "political subordination" and "the revolutionary offensive" were linked, since acceptance of the political supremacy of the CI meant disciplined acceptance of the tactics of regroupment and the united front, the laborious "winning of the masses" demanded by the CI leadership around Lenin and Trotsky. The political debate over the question in the CI itself was to prove very heated, with a large minority supporting the "lefts," and Lenin and Trotsky winning a majority only after a long struggle. The position of the Bolshevik majority and the Russian youth league, however, finally carried the conference. At the Third Congress of the CI, from 22 June to 12 July 1921, the following resolution on youth-party relations was accepted:
"The relation of Communist Youth Organizations to the Communist Parties is fundamentally different from that of the revolutionary youth organizations to the social democratic parties. In the common struggle for the quick accomplishment of the proletarian revolution the greatest unity and strictest centralization is necessary. The political direction and leadership can lie internationally only with the CI, and in the individual countries only with the national sections. It is the duty of the CYO’s to subordinate themselves to this political direction (program, tactics and political directives), and to integrate themselves into the common revolutionary front… The CYO’s, which have begun to organize their own ranks on the principles of the strictest centralization, will exercise iron discipline towards the CI as bearer and leader of the proletarian revolution. The CYO’s shall occupy themselves within its organizations with all political and tactical questions, will take a position, and work for these resolutions within, but never against, the CP of their country. In cases of serious differences of opinion between the CP’s and CYO’s the right of appeal to the ECCI (Executive Committee of the Communist International) shall be utilized. The surrender of their political independence means under no circumstances the renunciation of their organizational independence, which is indispensable on educational grounds."
—Resolution on the Communist International and the Communist Youth Movement
The political subordination of the youth to the party flows from the principle of discipline towards the revolutionary movement, and in the concrete instance the recognition that the CI was the bearer of revolutionary continuity and the revolutionary program. The CI Resolution placed the relationship of youth and party clearly in historical and political context:
"In some countries where the building of the communist parties is still in progress and the youth have just split from the Social Patriot and Centrist parties the slogan of absolute political and organizational independence of the youth movement dominates, and in this situation this slogan is objectively revolutionary. The slogan of absolute independence is wrong in those countries where strong Communist parties already exist and where the slogan of absolute independence is used by the Social Patriots and Centrists for misleading the youth against the communist youth organization. In these cases, the communist youth organization follows the program of the communist party."
—quoted in Richard Cornell, The Origins and Development of the Communist Youth International, 1914-1924 (PhD thesis), p. 316
The Danger of Dual Vanguardism
Whereas it was indispensable for the revolutionary youth organizations in WWI to separate themselves politically from the treacherous and class collaborationist leadership of the Second International, and struggle to develop and implement a revolutionary program, so conversely it was necessary for the youth to subordinate itself to a truly revolutionary international—which genuinely embodied the program of proletarian revolution. To do otherwise would be to engage in dual vanguardism—in the last analysis to challenge the International for the leadership of the class. The CI resolution is quite explicit:
"With the formation of the CI and the CP’s in the individual countries, the role of the proletarian youth organizations changes within the common proletarian movement. The continued existence of the CYO’s as politically independent and leading organizations would lead to the formation of two competing communist parties, differentiated merely by the age of their members."
—Resolution…
The recognition of the necessity of one vanguard, as the consistent revolutionary leadership of the proletariat, and the necessity of this role lying with the most tested, experienced and capable proletarian revolutionaries—i.e., with the CI and the communist parties, also implies the imperative of political differences being fought out internally, should they arise between party and youth. The youth must enjoy full rights of political discussion within its own ranks, and the possibility of influencing the party through its representatives. Conversely, the party must have the opportunity of exercising its guidance at all times upon the youth, of aiding the political maturation of the youth cadre, and maintaining its revolutionary orientation. Should a serious political difference develop, it is imperative that there be channels for its internal political resolution (thus, the right of appeal first to the Executive Committee of the CYI, then to the ECCI and finally to the World Congresses as the highest bodies of the common movement). The party is the concentrated subjective element of the proletarian revolution, and where principled agreement exists no breach is legitimate unless all avenues of internal discussion have been exhausted. Ultimately, of course, the final arbiter of any deep-going dispute is history—and its motor force, the class struggle—thus no organizational mechanism can guarantee that schisms will not develop. However, a split within the revolutionary vanguard—especially between party and youth, where it implies a terrible break in continuity—can only be justified by a deep-going principled counterposition. This was precisely the case with the Second International after 1914, but such an eventuality can only be considered as a last resort.
In order to provide for the requisite reciprocal political influence, the CI resolved:
"The close political co-operation of the CYO’s with the CP’s must also be expressed in a firm organizational connection between the organizations. A constant reciprocal representation of the organization and party leaderships, from the regional, district and local organizations down to the cells of the communist groups in industry and in the unions, as well as a strong reciprocal representation at all conferences and congresses is unconditionally required. In this way it will be possible for the CP’s to continually influence the political line and activity of the youth, and, on the other hand, for the youth to exercise an effective influence on the party."
—Resolution…
Importance of Organizational Independence for the Youth
The political subordination of the youth to the party—the proletarian vanguard—does not, however, invalidate the need for organizational independence for the youth. Lenin had outlined the reasons for this organizational independence long before the Third Comintern Congress, in his review of The Youth International:
"…the youth must of necessity advance to socialism in a different way, by other paths, in other forms, in other circumstances than their fathers. Incidentally, that is why we must decidedly favor organizational independence of the Youth League, not only because the opportunists fear such independence, but because of the very nature of the case. For unless they have complete independence, the youth will be unable either to train good socialists from their midst or prepare themselves to lead socialism forward."
—Works, Vol. 23, p. 164
Each generation faces a unique conjuncture of problems and tasks, which lead by different routes to the development of communist consciousness. While the fundamental causes are essentially identical (the contradictions of a capitalism which has outlived its progressiveness) the unique character of the process for each generation must be recognized and an organizationally flexible context provided for the development of creative revolutionary response. Although the youth needs the guidance of the party, it also needs to develop the initiative, judgment and political experience of its own leadership and cadre, and to do so vis-Ã -vis the specific problems facing the youth as a specially oppressed group within capitalist society. The primary educative mechanism of the youth is in its own experience of the class struggle.
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